Everyone loves browsing neat and beautiful sites designed with an intuitive and clean interface. While most would agree to it, many don’t realize the amount of skill, effort, and time that is spent on making such a website user-friendly and attractive. And this tremendous effort falls into the hands of the front-end developers. It’s not an easy task, either.
Don’t despair if you want to be a front-end developer, though. Here are some tips to improve your web development and front-end designing skills.
Automation is the Key!
A front-end developer always carries the burden of taking care of small details, and it all can be quite overwhelming at times. So many things to consider, such as testing, boilerplate, dependency management, workflow, optimization, performance, deployment, build, and so many others. Sounds complicated, right?
Incorporating automation into the workflow can take some load off your shoulders. With automation in place, you can focus on other elements such as testing, optimization, etc. You’ll also have time to work on front-end development core areas such as CSS, HTML, client-side software creation groupbwt.com, user experience enhancements, and other tasks.
Automation will increase your productivity while giving you time to learn and focus on areas that can improve your site’s overall functionality. Examples of great automation tools include Broccoli, Gulp, and Grunt.
Refactor Every Once in a While
Refactoring means rewriting your code to fit specific criteria. For example, you can refactor code to improve the structure or include documentation for future revisions. When you refactor your code, you enhance it while keeping the functionality intact. This activity improves the code’s readability quotient as well as its quality. When done often, it continuously updates your code into a fresher and cleaner version than the previous one. Another important reason for refactoring your code is to keep it free from plagiarism.
Remember the first tip, automation? You can string together appropriate commands and automate them via a single task, which is an excellent way to save cost, time, and effort. Simple and straightforward as they may be, command-line tools are often used in enterprise software development.
Learn Command Line
Using GUI tools in powering the terminal has become the developers’ standard convention. The problem with this scenario is that most developers tend to spend a sizeable amount of valuable time to handle these GUI tools rather than progressing the terminal. The proper way is to learn the command line.
You can start with command line basics and progress to higher levels along the way. Using command-line tools, you will be able to complete more tasks easier and with higher efficiency than you would have with GUI tools.
Use Productive Tools
Web and front-end development has become so popular that there are many web development tools available on the Internet. These tools range from smart plugins to browser add-ons. The amount of currently available choices is just massive! Utilizing these tools means you don’t have to ‘reinvent the wheel’.
Just use the tools that fit your app’s requirement, modify it according to your specifications, and you’re done! The benefits of these productive web tools make them worth an investment. Some of the most useful productivity tools that can help you in your front-end development tasks include Sass, Bootstrap, GitHub, Emmet, jQuery, and Sublime Text.
Never Stop Being Curious
Learning is a never-ending journey, as the adage goes. The same applies to front-end development. As a front-end developer, you need to keep yourself continuously abreast with the latest innovations and news in the field. Never be complacent and never stop being curious! This is where being proactive comes in by learning new things regarding the front-end development area from informative videos and blogs.
Most front-end developers get their regular doses of useful and informative stuff from CSS Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly, Shoptalk Podcast, and Codrops. Also, if you hear or read of webinars and conferences, make sure you attend them as much as possible. Meeting talented people and expanding your network is just a couple of excellent opportunities provided by these meetups.
While the tips listed above can help you improve as a front-end developer, there are only two things you should always remember as you design your platform – keeping it neat and straightforward. Also, create a signature style you can call your own and use it on all your works.
